TI8.0 (937) Restore -> "Partition Incompatible with WinXP"

Recently, for reasons that aren't clear, WinXP became corrupt on my primary boot drive (WD740GD Raptor - basic, NTFS). I restored the drive using TI 8.0 (937) from backup using the Acronis boot CD, and the drive booted up no problem. But then I began to experience spontaneous reboots where WinXP subsequently reported "system failure". Hmmm.

I suspected the drive might be going bad, so I ran WD diagnostics. They reported zero errors in the drive. However, Partition Magic reported the partition had "open files" and needed to be checked. To my surprise, Chkdsk reported zero errors.

I decided Windows may have been corrupted prior to backup, so I set out to repair it via the setup disk. The setup disk then reported the primary partition was incompatible with XP. Taking comfort in knowing I had backups, I deleted and recreated the partition. To my astonishment, the new partition was still deemed "incompatible" with WinXP. WTF?

At this point, I was thinking the drive might truly be bad despite the diagnositics, so I restored the original image to a Maxtor 300 GB I had sitting unused. Afterward, it booted fine and I'm thinking I'm golden. Just to make sure everything's fine, I checked the partition for errors with Partition Magic. Crap. Open Files. Chkdsk -> No problems. WinXP setup disk -> Partition incompatible with WinXP. WTF?

So now I have not one, but two drives that are out of whack. They both will boot, but I'm afraid to put any new data on them.

Anyone know how to straighten these drives out?? I'm running out of ideas.

It sounds like the partition boot record may be damaged. Obviously not enough to prevent Windows from booting, but it may have some subtle discrepancies.

Do you have a Windows XP CD? Boot to the recovery console and run the "fixboot" command to rewrite the partition boot record of the system partition. See if that fixes the problem.

If that's not it then it may be a disagreement between the partition type listed in the partition table and the type identified in the partition boot record. Both should be Type 07 for NTFS partitions. How does XP Disk Management console identify your Windows partition? Could you post a screen shot?

@Grover - I thought of that and confirmed the CD boot version of Acronis is the same.

k0lo said:

Do you have a Windows XP CD? Boot to the recovery console and run the "fixboot" command to rewrite the partition boot record of the system partition. See if that fixes the problem.

Click to expand...

I tried this, but also thought I'd try fixmbr.exe while I was at it. Fixmbr reported the partition table was invalid and offered to fix it with the caveat it might hose everything. I thought this might be the nub of the matter so I told it to proceed. It completed without issue, I rebooted, and up popped a nasty message "invalid partition".

Perhaps I shouldn't have done the fixmbr, but it was reporting a problem with the partition, so I surmised fixboot must not have been sufficient.

k0lo said:

If that's not it then it may be a disagreement between the partition type listed in the partition table and the type identified in the partition boot record. Both should be Type 07 for NTFS partitions. How does XP Disk Management console identify your Windows partition? Could you post a screen shot?

Click to expand...

I captured a screenshot, and saved it to the desktop of the now hosed disk. It didn't report anything unusual, however. It showed both drives to be NTFS, with the Maxtor (prior to getting hosed) showing active. Except for the NTFS designation, I didn't see an indication for "Type" specifically. Is that in the normal XP view? I also checked "properties" for the each drive and partition, and don't recall it there either.

I noticed in the sticky at the top of this forum that Acronis offers a bootable iso that does something to the mbr. They don't describe what it does, so I'm not sure if it's what I need.

I'm now re-restoring to the WD disk. I might have a little time to play with it when I get home this evening, but then I'll be out of pocket for the weekend so acting on any new suggestions will have to wait until Monday.

One last thought - I should have mentioned in the original post that both these drives are SATA, and they're both newer than my version of Acronis. I wonder if TI 8.0 might have had issues with this drive type since it's relatively recent. Whether that's the case or not, it's clearly time to upgrade to avoid that type of compatibility issue in the future. From what I read, tho, the backup archives will only be compatible with 1 higher version of TI. I'm 3 versions behind now...

That's interesting about the partition table problem; that must be at the heart of the issue. I note from your first post that you have Partition Magic. It would be interesting to run ptedit.exe to get a view of how the partition table is seen. If you can get the disk restored and running again, try posting a screen shot of the output of the Windows version of ptedit.

Usually if there is a problem with a SATA driver in the TI boot environment it will either not see your disk at all or it will see both halves of a SATA RAID array as separate disks. I kind of doubt that TI 8 drivers have anything to do with this problem but you never know...